5 Reasons Facebook 'Home' Is Not A Guaranteed Success

Facebook has finally announced a phone product called Home. It's an application layer, or skin, that sits on top of the Android operating system, and makes a Facebook cover photo the first thing you see when you turn on the phone. This is part of Facebook's big move to become more native to mobile, as more of its users access the network through their smartphones.

There's good reason to predict this will be a hit, if Facebook Home can act as an attractive, high-quality filter to the mobile web.

"By going 'over the top' of Google's prized Android operating system, Facebook is doing to Google exactly what Google did to the Internet," said Victor Basta, managing director of Magister Advisors. "Sitting on top of a chaotic system, making it simple and uniform through a proprietary layer, and underpinning this with deep search functionality."

But from what we saw at the "Home on Android" event at Facebook's headquarters on Thursday, Facebook still has a ways to go before Home becomes an interface that millions of people want to download.

Mark Zuckerberg said during the launch that Facebook had never seen the point of building an actual phone, since a handset with decent sales would ship 20-30 million units. That's a single-digit percentage of its one-billion+ user base.

Assuming Facebook defines success as reaching more than 20 to 30 million people with Home, it probably wants at least this many people to download the software suite.

But here's why that might not be so straightforward, and five reasons Home could be a slow burn for Facebook:

1) A very limited roll-out.

Facebook Home will be available to download for free on Google Play on April 12. But you'll only be able to use if it you have one of six devices - the latest handsets from HTC and Samsung. You'd additional need the most recent versions of Facebook and Facebook Messenger installed on your Android phone. And you'd need Android Jellybean, nothing below - even though Gingerbread is the most popular version of Android out there due to its proliferation on low-cost phones. "When you dive a bit deeper it starts to become limited to a subset of the total users of Android," says Chris Jones, a principal tech analyst at Canalys in Palo Alto who was at the Facebook Home launch event.

2) The Messaging feature in Home doesn't have rich multimedia-sharing features.

Facebook wants to engage more deeply with smartphone users, but to do that it has to compete with popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Kik and GroupMe which let users share video and audio clips within real-time group chats. Home will have group messaging, but Facebook's mobile vice president, Vaughan Smith, said on the sidelines of Thursday's event that Facebook Messenger on Home wouldn't have multimedia sharing features like these at launch, but that they would be released eventually. He wouldn't give details on when.

3) Who really wants a Facebook-optimized phone?

Perceptions of Facebook have been changing in the last few years. HTC's First, the first phone to have Facebook Home pre-installed and optimised for the hardware, looks like it is being targeted at young people with its $99.99 price tag on a two-year AT&T contract. But the indications are that teens and young people are moving away from Facebook to more private messaging services like SnapChat and WhatsApp. And then there's the perception of Facebook among adults - as a guilty pleasure, as something you wouldn't want to boast about spending too much time on. To have a Facebook skin on your phone may suggests you spend a lot of time on Facebook, and not all adults might want to admit this.

4) What's to stop other social networks from creating a "skin" on Android like Facebook Home?

Facebook suggested during its release that it used clever engineering to make an application layer that allowed Facebook to become a skin for Android. But it's not unique. Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony are all known have have been using user-interface overlays, or "skins" on Android for a long time to differentiate their handsets from other Android phones. But Facebook's move towards making a unique skin may prompt software companies -- rival social networks, or mobile messaging apps -- to also come out with their own version of Home. If Facebook home is successful, they're more likely to try the strategy themselves, creating more competition for smartphone engagement.

5) The unknown consequence of creating a wall between Google and mobile carriers.

Home makes Facebook a primary conduit for communication on an Android device. Carriers have seen this coming for a while, and a Facebook interface puts another wall between customers and their services and brand. Same with Google. The extra layer of a home screen might not seem substantial, but smarpthone users are constantly looking at their devices and seeking the most frictionless way to access services. Any extra step towards opening Google Maps or Google Play is new friction that Google won't find helpful. No surprises then, that while Facbeook's Home event was all about Android, a single representative from Google was on stage.

I cover developments in AI, robotics, chatbots, digital assistants and emerging tech in Europe. I've spent close to a decade profiling the hackers and dreamers who are bringing the most cutting-edge technology into our lives, for better or worse. I'm the author of "We Are An...